I WAS SIXTEEN. A LATE-SEASON BLIZZARD THAT YEAR had dumped thirty inches of snow at the end of April, and by June the land was so sodden that the rivers flooded around Thebes. You could even hear the pounding of Twin River Falls from sixty miles south.
Everything was mud and rain. One morning was so bad that Harrison, driving me and Izzy to school in his Jeep, hydroplaned down the road from our house and took a nosedive into the mudbank at the bottom of the hill. None of us was hurt, but the car stuck so stubbornly that Christopher had to call a King Construction industrial towing vehicle to come pull it back onto the road. The three of us stood in our slickers and boots and watched the wheels of the Jeep grind so hard without purchase that mud flew up in the air and showered down on the trees and shrubs like some kind of biblical plague.
Paul was gone. Hitchhiking around the country, dumpster-diving for food, and camping out at any protest site that needed warm bodies. Uncle Christopher was distraught and furious. Since I was the only one around to stand in for my brother, he took his misery out on me. He railed at me for being ungrateful and thoughtless, while at the same time musing that if I ever left the family like Paul did, he and Evelyn would never recover.
I was just as upset with Paul as my uncle was. It was supposed to be me and my brother against the world. Now he thought that random political causes and random people were more important than us. And in the summer of 2006, no shortage of protests seemed to require his absence from my life. Every so often I got an email: Paul was marching against the war in Iraq with a group in Nebraska. Paul was organizing against the war in Afghanistan with a group in Missouri. It was a bunch of blah, blah, blah to me, mired as I was in the mud of my own life.
School was a bore. I was phoning it in and still at the top of my class. I wore all black and refused to cut my hair. In Thebes, this was enough to make me the school rebel, the punk goth girl, whatever. I was counting the days till the end of the year when at least I could hole up alone in my bedroom. Then Christopher called me and Harrison into his office to inform us that we’d both be working full-time jobs this summer.
“Here’s a list of the opportunities I’ve generated for you,” he announced, handing us each a printout with five bullet points on it. I glanced at mine skeptically before saying, “I’ll probably spend the summer canvassing Thebes for the Democratic Socialist Party.” Since there wasn’t a house in town without a PROUDLY REPUBLICAN, PROUDLY AMERICAN flag flying from its front porch, including our own, I was pretty certain that door-to-door socialism was not on Christopher’s list of approved activities.
“You’ll have a job precisely to keep you from rabble-rousing like your brother. This is for your benefit, Antonia. The summer after junior year is when Paul dropped out of school. I blame idle hands and an idle mind.”
My brother never suffered from either. But his passions were unsanctioned and therefore didn’t exist.
Harrison didn’t even look at the list we’d been handed.
“I want to work for you,” he said to his father.
I laughed. “Are you high?”
But Harrison didn’t laugh back.
Apparently, he was serious.
“Well,” said Uncle Christopher, “this is a surprise.”
Didn’t my cousin realize he was voluntarily stepping into a homophobic cesspool? While he wasn’t officially out to anyone but me, he wasn’t exactly “in” either. By his own admission, he was biding his time until we finished high school because he understood in his bones that no one at Mt. O would have a problem with a popular gay boy who didn’t make a political statement. To come out, to publicly go against the norm, would automatically be a political statement.
“Why should I rock the boat?” Harrison said when I pushed him to be true to himself. “Things are good for me right now, I can wait. It’s not like Tank Mitchell is going to suddenly announce that he’s gay too and we’ll make out in the hallway and live happily ever after.”
“But what about the truth? Don’t you feel like you’re living a lie?”
“Toni, you’re way more absolutist than I am. Can’t the truth be a lot of things? Like, the truth that I’m happy the way things are?”
“Is that a truth, or is that a compromise?”
“What isn’t a compromise? Look, I’ve got you to talk to, and hello, an internet full of porn, and I’m just not sad.”
“But Harry, what about the principle of the thing? Are you really saying that you’ll put up with homophobia as long as it’s subtle?”
“Does everything have to be painful all the time? If you just let yourself chill for a minute, you could have friends and have fun too.”
Okay, I granted him points for skimming over the hideousness of high school as best he could, even though I thought his decision was wrong. But working at King Construction?
My uncle looked unconvinced as well.
“I thought some of the media opportunities I arranged would be more to your liking, Harrison.” Was this his way of protecting his son from the toxic environment that Harry seemed hell-bent on conquering? I found myself in the unusual position of being on my uncle’s side.
“You’re such a good writer,” I said, “maybe there’s something you could do with that?”
Harrison just shook his head.
“I want to work for you,” he said to my uncle. “I want to be part of the family business.”
Christopher stared at him for a moment. “There will be no favoritism,” he said.
“I expect none.”
“Everyone in this company has to put on a hard hat and know what it’s like to work on-site. Even the people I hire to run the office.”
“Understood.”
“You’ll make minimum wage.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I will personally tell whoever becomes your supervisor that you don’t have permission to go over his head to me, ever. You’re at the bottom of the chain of command, son, and that means infantry.”
Oh my god.
My uncle smiled, just a little, at Harrison. A smile of pride. Harry was looking mighty excited about the sickening prospect of joining Christopher’s infantry.
I dropped the printout back on my uncle’s desk.
“I don’t care where you stick me,” I said, “as long as it’s far away from King Family Construction.”
That’s how I ended up as a summer intern at the Law Office of Leo Roberts and Associates, in the heart of the bustling metropolis of downtown Thebes, Minnesota. Mr. Roberts was a seventysomething Korean War veteran and president of the local Rotary club. Thanks to whatever VFW brotherhood this meant between him and my uncle, Mr. Roberts was willing to take my miserable, uninterested teenaged self into his temporary employ.
“Excellent grades,” he said when he looked over the junior year transcript my uncle sent him in advance of my first meeting with him. “You should consider becoming a lawyer.”
At the time I thought he was a crazy old coot. I would never be a lawyer. All I could see ahead of me was getting out of the house, out of Thebes, out of the entire state of Minnesota.
The first week of my internship was every bit as dreary as I’d expected. I sat cross-legged on the floor in a windowless back room surrounded by bankers’ boxes filled with paperwork from decades before there was an internet, and a yellow legal pad with Mr. Roberts’s shaky scrawl instructing me how to determine which documents should be saved and scanned, which should be archived but not scanned, and which should be shredded. Four hours went by like four days. Piles of paper grew around me as I removed them from one set of boxes, then shrank as I refiled them into another.
I listened to deep tracks from the Motown catalogue on my iPod to stay sane and plotted all manner of bloody vengeance against Harrison’s hideous supervisor, John Joseph, a brawny dolt who had gone to high school with Christopher. Mr. Joseph thought all boys needed to be hazed to become men and took quite literally the instruction from above that the son of the boss was to be treated like the son of someone he’d never met. Harrison would come home exhausted from a day on the job site and tell me that Mr. Joseph had told him to spend all morning with a hand trowel shoveling pebbles off a driveway that needed to be paved. Then when he came back from lunch, he found the trough of pebbles empty and Mr. Joseph yelling at him for slacking on the job. As soon as he started shoveling again, he heard his supervisor snicker with a coworker while they watched him on his knees, refilling the trough.
I had murderous fantasies toward John Joseph and my uncle. I tried to comfort my cousin by describing in graphic detail how I wished I could unveil my old secret identity as Batman, from our childhood game, and smash both their heads into smithereens on his behalf. But Harrison wasn’t interested. In fact, he seemed exhilarated by his experience.
“Nobody will ever say I didn’t pay my dues,” he said from his bed where he lay while I brought him ice packs for his knees and pilfered shots of vodka from Evelyn’s stash. Despite the obvious pain of his body, a strange light shone in his eyes. My cousin believed in what he was doing, and he didn’t mind being surrounded by ogres while he did it.
I was in the stockroom, sorting through depositions for the 1987 Carlsbad v. Carlsbad domestic violence hearings. Of course, the husband won. While I was taking out my private revenge on all abusive ogres past and present by writing fuck off and die in red Sharpie on the documents going into the “to be shredded” pile, I heard a commotion out in the reception area of Roberts and Associates.
The noises were muffled from my windowless stockroom, but I could make out high-pitched giggles from the receptionist and the slow but recognizable low rumble of Mr. Roberts himself. I stood up and cracked open the door to see what could possibly have interrupted the otherwise staid and predictable sounds of my summer employer.
I first saw James Hollings from the back. He was tall, thin, he wore a khaki suit that fit, and his dark brown hair was longish, curling around the top of his jacket collar. Everyone in the office was leaning toward him like iron shavings toward a magnet. When he laughed, I realized that there hadn’t been a male voice other than scratchy million-year-old Leo Roberts’s in this building since I started. All of a sudden, I felt achingly thirsty. I slipped out of my cave and attempted to be invisible as I inched my way across the back of the office to the water cooler.
James—although I didn’t know that was who he was yet—turned around at the sound of the water gurgling out of the giant plastic jug. Oh, he was handsome! But in a way completely unfamiliar to me. This wasn’t the half-bored, half-menacing face of a high school football player waiting for the admiration of a girl because it was his natural-born right. His features were made of sharper stuff: angular, clean. The light hit him differently from the others, as if he’d brought his own air into the room. I felt my cheeks redden and instinctively moved to hide my blush behind my long mane of black hair.
“Who’s this?” he asked the room at large.
I was bent over the water cooler, my hair falling in front of my face and dragging into the cup I held under the dispenser. When I stood up, the ends dripped water down the front of my black dress and my legs. As the drops hit my toes, I realized, with embarrassment, that I was barefoot. I had gotten into the habit of kicking off my shoes when I sat on the floor filing papers.
James Hollings looked at me, slowly, from my bare feet up. And when I say looked, I mean he looked. I was momentarily frozen, other than the prickles that rose on my legs and arms as he took in the entirety of me before meeting my dark eyes with his green ones. I lifted my chin slightly. He lifted his in return. Without shifting my gaze, I brought my overflowing cup of water to my mouth, spilling a few more drops in the process, and drank in huge gulps. Nothing had ever tasted as necessary as that cold water. I barely swallowed before taking the next gulp, and the next.
After I drained the cup, I wiped my mouth with the back of my left hand. He was still looking.
“That’s Antonia,” said Wanda, the receptionist whose hips poured over either side of her desk chair and practically touched underneath the seat. “Toni King. Our summer intern.”
James finally stopped staring at me to acknowledge Wanda, then raised his eyebrows at Leo Roberts.
“Any relation?” he asked quietly.
“Niece. Adopted.”
I felt trapped, mired, subsumed by the double force that was Uncle Christopher and my own past. Nowhere in Thebes was there any escape.
“Antonia, meet James Hollings, our summer associate,” Mr. Roberts said. “James started like you, as an intern. Now he’s just finished his first year of law school at the U.” I could hear the pride in his voice. He looked at James with warmth and delight, like he couldn’t quite believe his luck that this person was real and in his presence. Like a father would.
“You made it possible,” said James. “Your letter of recommendation, and all you’ve taught me.” I could hear in his voice that the warmth went both ways.
My thirst was gone, but the dry lump in my throat remained. My big toe discovered a loose thread on the worn-out gray wall-to-wall carpet and I hooked it around the front of my foot, pulling it tight. Anything to divert me from the sensation that I might choke on the intensity of being in the presence of James Hollings.
He turned to me.
“Are you at Athens Community?”
Even this innocuous question coming from him felt like a dive bomb into my essential self. I scraped my toe back and forth across the frayed carpet fiber, letting the sharp ends bite into my flesh.
“She’s in high school!” Wanda’s habit of ending every statement with a peal of laughter was never more irritating than in this moment. As I continued to stare at James, I felt high school, in all of its embarrassing, infantilizing, miserable reality, grow between us like a thicket. He was falling away from me, blurring into a less visible outline.
“I’m thinking about going to law school,” I blurted out. The sound of my own voice embarrassed me. As did my words. Although law school suddenly seemed less horrible now that I knew he was there.
“Well,” he said, still from the other side of the brambles that high school had created, “I’d be glad to offer my perspective about applying. I’m a lot closer to that process than Leo here!”
Mr. Roberts chuckled. He liked being teased by James. So different from the barbs that traveled like poison-tipped spears across the great room of my own home.
“Can you believe that I was in the very first graduating class of William Mitchell College of Law? 1958. I went on the G.I. Bill after Korea. Things are different these days. You know, there are women there!”
James caught my eye again at this—he was brimming with suppressed laughter. I wanted to say something in my typically quick and witty manner, but I could only manage a tiny, rather wan smile, when:
“Ouch! Oh fuck! Oh no, I’m sorry I said fuck!”
I pulled my toe out of the tangle of carpet thread to see the silver head of a thumbtack sticking out of the bottom.
Everyone was staring at me. And my feet. A small trickle of blood dripped from the big toe with the thumbtack and landed on the carpet. I saw Wanda’s thoughts as if she said them out loud: Great. The barefoot idiot intern got blood on my carpet and you know who’s cleaning that up.
“Don’t move!” James swooped over to me, picking up a small chair along the way and depositing it behind me. He gestured for me to sit, which I did. He dropped to his knees and cradled my dirty heel in one hand while removing the tack with the other. Then he pressed the ball of my big toe with his thumb. My foot looked tiny between his hands.
“Wanda, can you bring the first aid kit from the break room?” he asked. I swear I saw Wanda roll her eyes as she pushed herself up from her chair and did as he asked.
Leo Roberts came over to us for a moment to make sure that I wasn’t injured in any manner likely to cause trouble. As soon as he saw that I would survive, he nodded and rubbed his hands together.
“Looks like you’ve all got this covered,” he said, and retired back to his corner office.
James pressed his thumb hard against my toe pad. “This will stop the bleeding,” he said. It was clear that this was no emergency, and there was unlikely to be a surplus of blood. Nevertheless, he kept my foot firmly in both his hands.
I bit my bottom lip hard to counteract my rapid breathing. Even with the pressure of my upper teeth against my own flesh to distract me, the heat from his hands turned my body nuclear.
With both Mr. Roberts and Wanda out of the room, he looked at me again with the same slow, all-encompassing stare that first jolted me out of my complacent dullness. He raised one eyebrow.
“Who are you, intern Antonia King?” he asked, ever so slightly letting the hand that held my heel lift to touch my ankle as well. “You don’t look like the family that runs our fair town of Thebes.”
He was intrigued by me. No boy from Mt. O High School—or anywhere—had given me the time of day other than to categorize me as someone who perhaps they had to tolerate. This was something new.
So I would be something new.
I pressed my foot back against his hand, just a tiny bit. And smiled.